Neuromorphic networks are widely used in pattern recognition and classification, with many potential applications from fingerprint, iris, and face recognition to target acquisition, etc. The parameters (e.g., ‘synaptic weights’) of the neuromorphic networks are adaptively trained on a set of patterns during a learning process, following which the neuromorphic network is able to recognize or classify patterns of the same kind.
A key component of a neuromorphic network is the ‘synapse,’ at which weight information is stored, typically as a continuous-valued variable. For applications that would benefit from compact, high-performance, low-power, portable neuromorphic network computation, it is desirable to be able to construct high-density hardware neuromorphic networks having a large number of synapses (109-1010 or more). Currently a neuromorphic network is typically realized as a software algorithm implemented on a general-purpose computer, although hardware for neuromorphic networks exist.
Phase change based resistors for mimicking the function of synapses are known e.g. from the paper by Tuma et al., Nature Nanotechnology 11, 693-699, 2016.
However, the resistance of such phase changed based resistors cannot be changed symmetrically upon the polarity of an input signal.